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Thursday, August 30, 2012

About Those Film Holders....

I have just returned from my 8th
Summer Games. It’s not much, perhaps, when you compare it to the venerable Giuliano
Belavacqua, who was attending his 23rd Olympics and who says he should
get credit for 30+. He’s done 11 Summer, 12 Winters, and feels each
Winter Games is worth 2 Summers.

I kind of agree with the “Winter” interpretation. Photography is tough enough without being cold.

But there is something
addictive about the Olympics that we photographers share with the rest
of the world. The collection of the best athletes in one place provides
an opportunity for us to try and do our best – the Photographer’s
Olympics, too, it seems. The way we cover the games continues to morph.

When I started in 1984, we shot film (E-6), sent it to the Official Fuji
lab in downtown LA, and got it back a few hours later. (This year for
the first time there was NO wet lab at all.) You then edited the slides
and THAT was your coverage. That waiting period between shooting and
editing still provided a minor sense of wonder, and of questioning
whether or not you GOT the shot. No screens on the backs of cameras yet
to inform of the good or bad news, the way we operate now. In fact the
wonderment that accompanied your shooting was in many ways the most
memorable part of the experience.

In those hours between exposing film, and getting your little green box
back, you reconsidered time after time whether or not you’d blown it or
saved the day. You wondered what else you could have done to be a
little better. To beat the guy standing next to you. The ability to be
looking at the screen of the 100 meter start, before they actually
finish the race (and there is a sprint amongst the photographers – to
see who can flip their cameras from shooting to viewing mode the
quickest – as they try and confirm for better or worse what they have
just shot) is, I would have to say, a horrible thing.

There is no meditating, no wondering, no imagining, no question marks.
The crowds are still cheering as you flick thru the screen to see what
made it to your sensor. I kind of marvel at it, and at the same time
wonder if we wouldn’t be better off as image makers if there were some
little built in time, something to leaven the rush of the need to know.
But if you would do that, maybe you’d want to go all the way and put a
big piece of gaffers tape over the screen and leave it there. I think
your pictures from the first few days would really suck. Like a duck
out of water, you would be consumed with what you didn’t get and how you
could make it better. But very quickly, I’ll bet, the pictures would
start to come. As confidence would build about exposures, angles, what
lens to use, I do think the pictures would start to come back. All the
skills from five generations of photography that have dissipated the
last ten years would start to return. A sense of craft, beyond merely
being confident you could “fix it in post” would enrich the level of
shooting.

I am not saying that there is no good to be had from the new
technologies. Far from it. The new cameras let us make pictures that
were never even imaginable a dozen years ago. But in all of that, in
the rush to bestow the crown of technical achievement upon the head of
digital photography, I think we risk losing a piece of the soul of all
our work. And whatever each of us can do as individuals to get beyond
the norm, the expected, the predictable, and the obvious that is what
photography in the new century demands of us.

This year, with so many photographers filing from their shooting
positions, the “life” in the Photo Work Room was vastly diminished.
Formerly, there would be anywhere from 200 to 400 photographers, all
spread out in a giant work area, each using either wired or Wi-Fi,
sending their edited images back to base. There was a wonderful
informal tradition that when you went to the restroom, or out for a
coffee, you ‘d leave the best thing you’d shot all day sitting big and
bold on your laptop screen, so that those around you would see your
best, and presumably get psyched out by the fact that they would never
be able to match your best work.

Now, most of that kind of editing takes place in the local venues, or
even in, say, the moat around the athletics track. Cards are uploaded
right after they are shot. Images are molded quickly, and sent out just
as snappily. To a sometime film guy like myself, you think you’re
living in a different century.

Speed of delivery, like speed on the track, becomes the standard.
Expectations for delivery are high. And for someone like myself who
keeps thinking that the current Olympics are the “last one,” there is
always the sense that maybe the last one isn’t QUITE the last one. There
will always be one more to do. Rio, I guess: here we come. We're just sayin'... David(published contemporaneously in Sportsshooter.com)

Yes, David. The loss of wonder, imagination and question reminds me about how I feel about the GPS and cell phone, that the technology, albeit empowering, revokes our intuition and ability to function in a less certain realm.